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Manual Training 
m Kducation 

BY 



In the application of thy principles thou micst he like the 
pancratiast, not like the gladiator; for iJie gladiator 
lets fall the sword lohich lie uses, and is killed; but the 
other always has his hand, and needs to do nothing else 
than use it, 

Marcus Aurelius. 



l^;!AY'^yi886' 



CHICAGO 
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 







Copyright by 
JAMES VILA BLAKE 



Manual Training in Education, 



CONTENTS 



Page 



Preface, by Prof, C. M. Woodward, Director of the 

Manual Training School of St. Louis, - - v 

AKGUMENT. 

General education, . .... 1 

Special education, - . . . 5 
That both are needful ; that one must not interfere 
with the other ; and that this leads to manual 

training in education, - ■ - - 7 

That this is specially needful to the handworker, 11 

That the handworker needs it economically, - 13 

That the handworker needs it socially, - - 15 

That handworking is of great dignity, - - 17 
That manual training in education is salutary for 
personal character: — 
In morals, - - - - =27 

In mind, - - - 31 

In body, - ■ •■ - - ■ 41 



iv ARGUMENT 

That manual training in education is very beneficial 
to the community: — 

For the rich, - ... , 43 

Foi the poor, - - - - 45 

For girls, - - - • - 47 

In production, - - - - 49 

In invention, - - - - - 55 

Eegarding immigration, - - - 57 

Regarding the apprenticeship -problem, -. 61 

Present condition of the subject: — 

Facts as to the need of manual training in ed- 
ucation, ----- 65 
.Beginnings ; present schools, - - 69 
Manual training in public schools, - 81 



PR.KKACE. 



The educational forces are changing front. One 
after another, the division commanders are discover- 
ing that the most direct, and practicable route to the 
citadel of strong, independent manhood and to the 
high ground of good citizenship lies through the ter- 
ritories of modern life, modern science, modern ac- 
tivities and modem thought. The old route in- 
volved a flank movement and a long detour into the 
territory of the ancients, to the heights of classic 
culture, from which, as a base, the whole modem 
country was to be attacked. Educational critics for 
many generations have agreed in the opinion that 
the old plan of campaign was the only one that was 
safe and sure. The undoubted success of many such 
movements in the past gave color to such views, and 
every suggestion of a better ahd more direct road 
was met by the fact that nearly every successful 
general in history had marched by the old path. To 
be sure this was not strange, inasmuch as no 
fairly equipped forces had ever attempted the direct 



vi PREFACE 

road. Nevertheless, the feeling in favor of a change 
has been gaining ground. 

On the one hand it has been urged that the ancient 
road lay through a dreary country, abounding in 
books and preserved symbols to be sure, but dry and 
sadly deficient in living things and opportunities foi 
showing one's parts. It is said that a great majority 
of the troops on that long journey drop out of the 
ranks and straggle into the modern country in a 
very sorry condition, having never seen the heights 
of classic culture, or only in the dim distance. On 
the other hand, those who in defiance of all the tra- 
ditions have dared to make the direct assault with 
such irregulars as could be got together, have re- 
ported the discovery of practicable routes, a most 
genial climate, an abundant supply of fresh food, 
and excellent opportunities for both deep strategy 
and practice at arms. Moreover, it is claimed by 
those who know something of both roads (and 
hence are qualified to speak on the subject) that the 
new road gives the best promise of gaining the high 
ground of independence and citizenship; and that 
from these points the capture of the heights of fine 
arts and culture will be more certain than ever. 
Hence the pulling down of old walls and the gradual 
change of front. 



PREFACE vii 

This military figure could be pushed much farther. 
I could have compared ancient and modern methods 
of warfare, their arms, their armors, their means of 
transportation, their camp equipage, and followers, 
and the objects of conquest, — but I prefer to let the 
reader carry out the figure for himself. 

The tendency of thoughtful and observant people 
is well shown in this modest little volume of Mr. 
Blake's. He has here given the result of his own 
vigorous thinking on what he has observed in him- 
self and in others. We were students together at 
Harvard, and through widely different personal ex- 
periences we have reached the common ground of 
a belief in the universal value of manual training as 
an element in a truly liberal education. 

It will be seen that Mr. Blake takes high ground. 
He has no narrow motive, no mean estimate of the 
value of objective training. He knows the stimulat- 
ing effect of seeing for one's self ; he has felt the force 
of things as compared with descriptions of things;' 
and he has tested the value of primitive j adgment. 

Mr. Blake does not agree, nor do I, with the 
school superintendent who claims that the sole ob- 
ject of school education is intellectual culture; that- 
"to superadd a thorough preparation for the busi- 



viii PREFACE 

ness of life, is to cripple the school in its appropri- 
ate sphere."* 

As to the meaning of a manual training school it 
is perhaps fitting for me to speak. I first suggested 
the name in 1879, when the St. Louis school was 
organized, having already had six years experience 
with tool instruction in the higher department of 
our polytechnic school. Our course of study and 
daily programme remain substantially as adopted 
in 1879. 

I followed no model either in America or in 
Europe. I profited by our own experience since 
1873; by the reports of the Russian technical 
schools as exhibited in Philadelphia in 1876 ; and 
by the admirable efforts in a similar direction made 
in Boston by President John D, Eunkle. I think I 
can fairly claim that experience has justified the or- 
ganization of this institution, under the name of 
the "Manual Training School." 

* 'The sphere of the school is intellectual training. To add to the 
proper work of schools the whole of moral training, and then to 
superadd a thorough preparation for the business of life, is to 
cripple the school in its appropriate sphere, and to fail in the im- 
possible labor thus to be assigned. That truth cannot be discov- 
ered, nor benevolence and Christianity flourish, without manual 
training, seems absurd. In the present advocacy of this training 
intellectual power is denied, except as it is derived through mat- 
ter. This is the grossest materialism. "—/SwiJi. J-. P. Marble, of 
Worcester, Mass. 



PREFACE ix 

I will define a manual training school by first 
telling what it is not. 

1. It is not a "manual labor" school. A "manual 
labor" school, as the term has been used for many 
years in America, is a semi- charitable institution, 
where a boy may in part pay his way by his labor, 
while receiving an ordinary education. The labor 
comes in chie'fly as a means of support, and only 
remotely, if at all, as a means of education. In such 
schools both the labor and the education are rela- 
tively of a low order. 

2. It is not an "industrial school." In America 
an industrial school is generally a reform school. 
In Europe it is an establishment intended to foster 
a particular industry, and all the pupils are directly 
trained to become workmen or workwomen in that 
industry. In such a school, literary and scientific 
training plays but a small part as compared with 
the industrial features. 

3. It is not a trade or an apprenticeship school. 
Boys attend the last named school for the purpose 
of learning a trade; the school may teach only one 
trade, or it may have several departments, and so 
teach several trades. In a trade school every boy 
learns one trade and only one, and then follows it. 
Instead pf a daily allowance of less than two hours 



X PBEFAGE 

in a shop, and five or six hours in study, recitation 
and drawing, it is generally just the other way. In- 
stead of a broad training in the typical tools and 
processes of all the practical arts, with a view to 
general intelligence and the acquisition of power in 
the social organism, the aim is to make a successful 
artisan in a particular trade. 

The object of a manual training school is to make 
men, not mechanics. It inculcates the thoughtful 
study and use of both books and tools. Its great 
object is education, moral, intellectual and physical; 
other objects are secondary. 

That industrial results will surely follow its intro- 
duction I have not the least doubt, but they will 
take care of themselves. Just as a love for the 
beautiful follows a love for the true ; and as the 
high arts cannot thrive except on the firm founda- 
tion of the low ones, so a higher and finer develop- 
ment of all industrial standards is sure to follow a 
rational study of the underlying principles and 
methods. Every object of attention put into the 
school room should be put there for two reasons, 
one educational, the other economic. Training, cul- 
ture, skill, comes first in importance; knowledge 
about persons, things, places, customs, tools, meth- 
ods, comes second. It is only by securing both 



PREFACE xi 

objects thattlie pupil gains the great prize, which 

is, power to deal successfully mth the men, things 

and activities which surround him. 

CM. Woodward. 
Manual TEArNma School, 

St. Louis, April 24, 1886. 



General Education. 

The first aim of education is to make noble human 
beings; and this means complete persons, roundly 
developed, with all their faculties as much exercised, 
trained and enlarged as can be in their special 
occupations. ' A certain wise and instructive phil- 
osopher loves to dwell on the value of "whole 
thinking," that is to say, the action of the mind on 
all sides and aspects of a subject, walking all round 
it, as it were, instead of looking on it only from one 
view-point; for a one-point view of anything is the 
same as to see it in a flat projection, and conse- 
quently to some degree distorted or untrue. Now, 
what wholeness is to thinking, wholeness also is to 
the growth of mind, heart, soul and body; namely, 
true beauty; for beauty is symmetry and correctness, 
(which means holding true relations with all things 
and being in one's proper place in nature), and 
power (because whatever is in its own place and 
truly related to other things will exercise all the 
power that belongs to it). No matter how strong, 
flourishing, exuberant, a development may be, if 
all m one direction, the result is distortion, unsight- 
liness, uselessness; as may be seen in trees on the 



3 MANUAL TMAININO 

sea-coast whose branches all point and lean one way 
by reason of the fierce blasts from the ocean, so that 
they seem as if the limbs on one side had failed to 
grow; and jbhe added verdure of the other side 
makes not the trees less ugly or grotesque. The 
half of a thing, whether it be of a man, of a thought, 
of a line in a poem, of an engine, or of a principle, 
is either delusive or worthless — unless it be that it 
serve a purpose by its destruction, as the half of a 
fruit or other edible which becomes useful by taking 
its place in the wholeness of some organism. But 
why add words and illustrations for so plain a thing 
as that the end of education is to make whole, large, 
noble men? Why, indeed, may not any one run 
who reads a command or announcement of nature 
written in letters so large before the mind? Yet 
true it is that this plain, common sense has not 
become the rule of institutions of learning, or of 
systems of education, or even of individual men, 
except a few of the wisest. 

A wise man said: '* Every one must elect at some 
time in his life — perhaps early — whether he will 
educate himself to be a broad, expanded human 
being, open on all sides to the countless winds of 
affairs, interests, principles, sympathies, humanities, 
or whether he will make of himself an acute special- 



m EDUCATION 3 

ist — a marvelous development of a particular skill. 
For myself," he added, " I cannot hesitate a 
moment. I wish to be as much as possible of what 
first and foremost I am, namely, a man." 



II. 

Special Education. 

Education has a secondary purpose, namely, to 
make excellent, thorough, skilled and productiva 
workmen in all branches of human service, whether 
in mechanics, agriculture, philosophy, poetry or 
arts. This special end of education has its special 
means and training. The age of universal knowl- 
edge, tritely to say, has passed; so completely, in- 
deed, that it is difficult for imagination in the present 
stress, whirl and complication of the arts and 
sciences, the immense development, the daily strides 
in all industries and philosophies, to conceive a 
time when an industrious and able scholar could 
know everything to be known, or, at least, worth 
knowing. The only way to equip the mind for ser- 
vice in any department at present, is voluntarily to 
be ignorant of a thousand other things ; and this re- 
quires so much resolution in large and gifted minds 
that sometimes such persons pass through life 
ineffective because they have not self-denial to 
endure the general ignorance necessary for the 
powerful exercise of a special function. To try to 
master all is to master none. " Some books," says 
Bacon, " are to be tasted, others are to be swallowed, 



6 MANUAL TRAINING 

and some few are to be chewed and digested ; that 
is, some books are only to be read in part, others to 
be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read 
wholly and with diligent attention." If the great 
philosopher were living now he would add that there 
are very many books and very many subjects not 
even to be tasted. The difficulty in education is to 
make a wise choice between hosts of ignorances, 
most of which we must submit to. What not to 
study or read is the decision that taxes wisdom and 
forethought; and on this decision turns our supply 
of great and finished workmen in all departments of 
knowledge and of art. 



ITI. 

That both General and Special Education are needful: 
that one must not interfere with the other' and 
that this leads to Manual Training in Education. 

If it be plain that the first object of education is 
to make complete men, and yet that there is a second 
end, namely, ,to produce special laborers of partic- 
ular skill and great power, though limited in scope, 
it follows that we must think how to prevent the 
second aim from interfering with the first. This 
brings into view the subject of manual training in 
education. Little as yet the training of the hand 
has been given a place in the school-house; but it 
belongs there; for the hand and the brain, the mus- 
cular and the nervous systems, the physical and the 
mental powers, stand so opposite to each other, 
though not opposed, are so different, yet each neces- 
sary, being the two great orders of faculty which 
make up the whole man, that to education of the 
hand, not indeed chiefly, yet fundamentally, we 
must look to obtain in one a more nobly grown 
human being and a skilled worker in a special art. 
For one mental exercise has something in it of all- 
others, and one manual activity of all bodily motion. 
A poet will have something of the virtues of history, 



8 MANUAL TRAININO 

philosophy, science, politics, economics even, per- 
haps of mathematics ; a machinist will have ex arte 
something of the benefits of the manual motions of 
carpentry, cabinet-making, tin work, tanning, 
plumbing and many other crafts. But the physical 
powers of a poet may be a sheer waste, the delica- 
cies of whose possible fruits he may not even dream 
of; and the mind of the hand-worker may go 
through life with hardly the experience of an abstract 
thought or generalization, which, Emerson says, is 
" the influx of divinity into the mind, hence the 
thrill which attends it," 

Therefore, if we aim to combine the two great 
ends of education, namely, whole development and 
special skill, we should begin with the broad dis- 
tinction between body and mind; in other words, 
let us head-train the hand-worker and hand-train 
the head worker. Manual training and head-train- 
ing together form the only whole education. 

Edward Atkinson, in a report to a committee of 
the Massachusetts legislature in 1879, thus defines 
the end and purpose of school and shop conjoined, 
that is, of a school of mechanical arts: 

The work of the school is to develop the mind 
and to give the skill and comprehension of a thor- 
ough mechanic in connection with other studies 



IN EDUCATION 9 

needed for a good common school education or in a 
higher course of professional study. The work in 
the shop is to teach the application of the theory 
and to train the hand, eye, muscle, and intellect to 
accuracy and readiness ; to make the eye and hand 
competent instruments of the instructed mind ; to 
aim to train mind and muscle together, so that in 
after life the most work shall be done with the least 
effort, the least waste, and in the most effective 
way. 



IV. 

That the two- fold Education is specially needful to the 
Hand' worker. 



It is noticeable that all the social privileges, re- 
fined and agreeable conditions, very often ample re- 
munerations, and many, if not most, of the greatest 
pleasures of life, consort already with the head- 
worker, whether eminent in literature or in com- 
merce or in science. The hand has little to do in 
it. Knowledge of manufacture, and especially any 
manual capacity therein, may have little part in the 
preparation of a commission-dealer in the product. 
Good penmanship makes no poem. But the handi- 
craftsman has vital need of the education of his 
mind. For where there is no mind, hand-worker 
and serf -worker mean the same. The handicrafts- 
man must be a hand-worker and head-worker to- 
gether to be better than a mimic of a few bodily 
motions. Herein is there not a great badge of dis- 
tinction and honor for handicraft, that while the 
poet, the historian, the essayist, the orator may be 
a sloven and Hottentot with his hands, intelligence 
and effort of mind must go with a trained hand to 
attain the highest result in hand-work? This is 
plain enough in sculpture, painting, music. It is 



12 MANUAL TRAINING 

the same in the building of an engine and in all 
transformations of material. But no honor can be 
worn without responsibility. As its peculiar demand 
of accompanying mind is a glory of handicraft, so 
the hand-worker ought specially to feel the call and 
the need to be an educated man. Wanted more 
and more every day are, not men who are "them- 
selves almost a part of an automatic mechanism." 
"ignorant practicers in a small department of 
trade,*' as Edward Atkinson has it, but mechanics, 
true mechanics — a term of large meaning and of 
great dignity. 

It is, perhaps, usual to lay stress on the value of 
manual training to those who work in other ways. 
This is true, and a point for stress ; but the other 
side is equally important. Let the hand-workman 
be collegized (to coin a term) as well as the college 
man be hand-workmanized, that both may be 
college-bred, thatis, trained in a collegium or collec- 
tion of arts and of masters. 



V. 

That the Hand-worker needs the twofold Education 
Economically. 

Manual training in education has a vast econom- 
ical interest for the handicraftsman; for it -will in- 
crease his power over his material and over himself. 
A general education, and especially a broad mechan- 
ical training ainiing to lay the same foundation for 
a special trade that a general university course 
gives preliminary to a law school, art school, or 
scientific school — this will give an inestimable sense 
of independence to a workman. Such is the exact 
effect of joining manual training with education; for 
this does not mean to join this or that trade with a 
school, but general mechanical instruction. From 
an English report, republished in this country by 
our bureau of education, we take the following con- 
cerning the apprenticeship schools of France. 

The trade instruction in the workshops is subdi- 
vided into two courses. In the first the pupils are 
taught the nature and conversion of materials. In 
the second they pass on to actual construction. The 
first or preparatory course is the same for all the 
pupils. They all go in rotation through the workshops 
for both wood and iron. One of the reporters on the 
schools says that " this is done in order to give suppleness 



14 . MANUAL TRAINING 

and certainty to the hand, and to enable them, when they 
have become workmen, to take up in case of need, at 
any rate for a time, a trade different frorrh their ordi- 
nary one, and thus to gain a living in bad times. " 
The choice of a trade takes place only at the com- 
mencement of the second course, which coincides 
with that of the second year, and it is only then that 
they begin to execute actual constructive work. No 
apprentice is allowed to commence any work, 
whether complete in itself or a part of a machine, 
without having previously made a sketch or a draw- 
ing of it to scale, so that the pupil must necessarily 
acquaint himself with its proportions and connec- 
tions and understand fully the nature of what he is 
doing. 



VI. 

That the Hand- worker needs the two-fold Education 
Socially. 



It is a common complaint that handicraftsmen 
are not admitted into the same social relations as 
men of letters, merchants, clerks or salesmen. 
Sometimes this is said to be owing to contempt for 
a laborious life ; but I hope not, and it is far from 
proved. As a nation we are hard workers — too 
hard — and the merchant, and even the scholar, often 
toils more slavishly than any . one in his employ- 
ment. Probably the social distinction is one of 
education, nice perception and refinement in man- 
ners. Many a hand-worker earns as much as a 
clerk, or even a lawyer, and yet his home will not 
have the same atmosphere, nor be the abode of the 
same manners — a difference shown in the few books 
at hand, the poor pictures, the coarse food and the 
rude customs at table. This is not because the man 
has been using a hand-tool all day ; but because, owing 
to many causes dating far back, there has been an ob- 
stinate lack of education, and, consequently, of out- 
ward delicacy and refinement. As fast as we obtain 
in the handicraftsman not only a handworker, but a 
hand-and-head- worker — a scientific manual laborer 



i6 MANUAL TRAINING 

-—we shall escape from this injurious social distinc- 
tion. ^ But it will not be so much social feeling that 
will rise above it as the handicraftsman himself; 
for, after all, it is mind and refinement of soul that 
make gentlehood here. Snobbery goes not far. 



VII. 

That Hand-working is of great Dignity. 



But it is to. be said and enforced that hand-work- 
ing is very dignified in itself. It would seem as if 
this need not be argued; and, indeed, it need not 
to the thoughtful, the well instructed, the self-re- 
spectful. Yet it is one point in which public opin- 
ion and social feeling need to be educated, although 
happily there are many and good signs that the tide 
is setting the right way. More and more esteem 
and valuation rise for skilled hand-workers over 
counter-tenders and hangers-on of the professions. 
More and more it will be held shameful and a con- 
fession of ignorance or of incompetency in young 
men to rush for clerkships and salesmen's places. 
A judge eminent on the bench of Massachusetts told 
me that if he were to begin life agam he would not 
be a lawyer, but a mechanic, so high was his appre- 
ciation of the dignity of a skilled hand's command 
over material. We shall come by and by to the old 
Rabbinical enthusiasm for the dignity of hand-work, 
which these learned teachers enforced both by pre- 
cept and example. They said: "Get your living 
by even skinning carcasses in the street, and do not 



18 MANUAL TMAININO 

say, 'I am a priest, I am a great man; this work 
would not befit my dignity.' " "He who does not 
teach his son a trade teaches him — robbery." Rabbi 
Johannan (ben Zakkaj) usually went by the name 
of his trade, the shoemaker; Rabbi Isaac was called 
the blacksmith, Shammaj (contemporary of the great 
Hillel) was a carpenter and architect. He never 
disdained to carry with him his carpenter's rule, 
even when teaching in the great synagogue. Other 
rabbis were tailors, bakers, gritsmakers, leather 
dressers, oven setters, sandalmakers, potters, dyers, 
threadmakers, coopers; and indeed it was by these 
manual labors that they lived, for there were no 
paid teachers. "Famous teachers," says Delitsch, 
"not only carried the chairs on their shoulders to 
the college because all labor calling for physical ex- 
ercise was held to be an honor, but a certain Pine- 
has was cutting stone when he (the stone mason) 
was informed of his election to the high priesthood. 
Rabbi Joseph turned a mill, Rabbi Shesheth drag- 
ged beams, highly praising this arduous exercise, 
and moi-e than a hundred Rabbis, whom the Tal- 
mud mentions, were artisans and bore artisan 
names." 

Deficient reverence for hand- work seems strange 
when one looks with due wonder and awe on the 



IN EDUCATION 19 

human nand. As an implement to deal with ma- 
terials, the hand is a structure so extraordinary for 
its flexihility, innumerable applications and count- 
less varieties of motions, as to cause, if we look at 
it well, a religious awe. "The ancient philosopher, 
Anaxagoras," says Plutarch^ "assigned the hand 
for the cause of all human knowledge and discre- 
tion." That old philosopher lacks not modern fol- 
lowers who say that whatever may be the delicacy, 
complexity and convolutions of the human brain, 
man, without his hand, would be but a brute. As 
regards arts which confer on life comfort, abundance 
and refinement, there is no doubt of the part the 
hand plays. The arts useful and fine, as has been 
said beautifully, " are literally handed down from 
generation to generation." Analogously, whoever 
considers the place, function and power of the 
thumb in the human hand will not wonder that it 
has given rise to the expression "to thumb," mean- 
ing to use constantly and mdustriously. The pre- 
sence of skill in the hand is a spiritual fact, an 
amazing, inexplicable thing, an unseen presence 
like what we call life or soul or spirit in the body, 
and is something beyond all a poet's, saint's or pro- 
phet's power to praise. A scientific musician told 
me he had composed a piece of music which was re- 



20 MANUAL TRAINING 

jected because he had written great spread chords 
which could be performed only by an immense hand 
like his own. A man with a large hand, he said, 
particularly an organist, who by the. use of the pe- 
dals has become used to the effect of wide chords, 
has much difficulty in writing for a small hand; 
but he added that some small hands make up by 
amazing skill. He had heard a girl play large hand 
chords by arpeggio so exquisitely and rapidly as to 
have all but the effect of one simultaneous stroke of 
the fingers, indeed, hardly distinguishable; and, 
taking the little hand in his own afterward, it was 
a marvel how it could be the tool that had done 
such things. On the same score Huxley claims 
proudly the right to be called a handicraftsman. He 
writes : 

Probably at this stage of our progress it may oc- 
cur to many of you to think of the story of the cob- 
bler and his last, and to say to yourselves, though 
you may be too polite to put the question openly to 
me : "What does the speaker know practically about 
this matter? What is his handicraft?" I think 
the question is a very proper one, and, unless I were 
prepared to answer it, I hope satisfactorily, I should 
have chosen some other theme. The fact is, I am, 
and have been any time these thirty years, a man 
who works with his hands — a handicraftsman. I 
do not say this in the broadly metaphorical sense 



IN EDUCATION 21 

in which fine gentlemen, with all the delicacy of 
Agag about them, trip to the hustings about election 
time and protest that they, too, are workingmen. I 
really mean my words to be taken in their direct, 
literal, and straightforward sense. In fact, if the 
most nimble-fingered watchmaker among you will 
come to my workshop he may set me to put a watch 
together, and I will set him to dissect, say, a black 
beetle's nerves. I do not wish to vaunt, but I am 
inclined to think that I shall manage my job to his 
satisfaction, sooner than he will do his piece of 
work to mine. 

A thorough mechanic, who is also an inventor 
and an intelligent thinker in science, once stretched 
out his right hand before me and said ; " Sir, that 
hand is worth f 50, 000! I mean that the skill in 
those fingers, invisible to you, will yield me as 
much per annum as $50,000 excellently invested." 
Could a greater and more admirable thing for inde- 
pendence^ for manliness, for power over circum- 
stances, be said by human being? One valuable qual- 
ity, almost a touching fact, as if the kind Creator had 
endowed with a democratic scope this wonderful 
organ which relates man so intimately and so closely 
with materials, is the exceeding educableness of 
the hand, the certainty that almost any hand can 
be trained to admirable degrees of skill. This 
power, which has such dignity and utility, is open 



23 . MANUAL TRAINING 

to all, wherein it is different from poetry, music, or 
the like. Says Leland: "There is not one person 
living having the usual amount of brains and hands 
who cannot learn to design well in simple decora- 
tive drawing in a few weeks, or, in extreme cases, 
in a few months, if he or she will try to acquire it. 
There is not one person who can execute a simple 
design who cannot master one or more of the minor 
arts." From statistics of apprenticeship schools in 
Paris it appears "that the greater number of boys 
become engine-builders or patternmakers, the two 
trades which in Paris command the highest wages" 
— thus showing the great educableness of the hand 
and the unquestionable prevalence of the capacity 
for its superior degrees of skill. Yet the highest de- 
grees seldom can be attained in one man's life. It 
is a striking tribute to the dignity of the hand, and 
also to the subtile results of mechanical training, 
that there is an inherited aptitude for manual work, 
and that previous training seems to have gone into 
the very fibers and blood of the body. Francis A. 
Walker said before the New England Manufacturers 
and Mechanic's Institute: 

There is great virtue in the inherited industrial 
aptitudes and instincts of a population, and those 
apticudes and instincts may be wonderfully special 



m EDUCATION 83 

and minute. You can no more make a nrst- class 
dyer or a first-class machinist in one generation 
than you can in one generation make a Cossack 
horseman or Tartar herdsman. In the highest in- 
dustrial sense artisans are born, not made. The 
problem is not so much to train as to breed. Aside 
from transmitted aptitudes and instincts there is 
also great virtue in the inherited traditions and 
prescriptions which pertain to the body of work- 
men, where any occupation making large demands 
for nicety of perception and nicety of manipulation 
has been long pursued. Writers have been driven 
to explain the unapproachable excellence of the 
steel blades which have for centuries been made in 
the city of Toledo, by assuming some mysterious 
property in the water with which swords are tem- 
pered. It is not the baptism of the blade, but the 
baptism of the artisan, which works the miracle of 
peerless edge and perfect elasticity. It is the tem- 
per of the mind of the worker to which, in the first 
instance, is due the temper of the weapon he forges. 

When such skill is attained in the hand, accom- 
panied, as it always will be in its highest exercise, 
with judgment and knowledge, what end to its dig- 
nity, power and command? While explaining the 
forging of vast rotary shafts for steamships, then in 
the making, the superintendent of a shop said: "A 
single false blow might spoil the whole thing, a bii 
of (Jirt might make a flaw which would cost us thou- 



24 . MANUAL TRAINING 

sands of dollars for damages^ It takes a good me- 
chanic to boss such a job, and we have to pay him 
good wages,— f 12.00 a day. He is the most im- 
portant man in the shop. " 

Note is to be taken of the artistic value of hand- 
work and the direct connection of the hand with 
SBsthetic sensibility. There is now a revolution, or 
perhaps an education coming to pass in the public 
mind, which makes known and felt the distinction 
between the merely beautiful and a quality in the 
beauty which gives it also a title to be called artistic. 
On this whole subject we cannot do better than to 
refer to Mr. Leland's paper, published by the bureau 
of education, and to quote from it briefly : 

Great stress may be laid on the fact that as the 
flower precedes the fruit, decorative art is developed 
in the race before it *ittains proficiency in the prac- 
tical. Before men had good axes or knives or plows 
or saws they made jewelry and embroidery far su- 
perior in many respects to anything now produced 
anywhere. We can imitate the shield "described by 
Homer, but the artist does not live who could design 
anything so elegant and original. There is an enor- 
mous and rapidly grov/ing demand for hand-made 
objects. As education and culture progress people 
begin to find out that in jewelry, as in pictures, or 
even in fire-irons, a thing to be truly artistic must 
be hand-made. It is not as yet generally under- 



IN EDUCATION 35 

stood that machinery, though it may manufacture 
pretty things, cannot make them artistic. There 
are no suc-h things as artistic works made in any 
way except by hand. Only the vulgar and ignorant 
confuse or confound that which is beautiful with 
what is artistic. Art does not consist entirely in 
prettiness, its best characteristic is the impression 
of individual character. This disappears in the 
machine, in fact, the more perfect machine work is, 
the less it is artistic. The faultlessly finished piece 
of silver wor^, such as no mere smith could ever 
rival, shows indeed the result of ingenuity, but not 
art. A Soudan bracelet made with a stone and a 
nail is far more artistic than a Connecticut mill 
manufactured dollar bangle; yet the latter is in' 
finitely the more * 'finished" of the two. 



VIII. 

That Manual Training in Education is Salutary in 
Morals, 



The importance of the exercise and training of 
the vjhole body as a factor in morality is very great. 
This, indeed, is a subject too large for these pages. 
Besides, it is collateral, for my subject is the train- 
ing of the hand. Yet the nice points in which the 
training of this one organ of the body affects moral- 
ity are too many and too important for the limits 
of this little essay. Let it be noted chiefly that 
whatever benefits result morally from training and 
developing the whole body, spring even more deli- 
cately from the training of the hand; because not 
only must many muscles be exercised, and, indeed, 
the whole body be brought into play by manual 
occupation, so that all the advantages of physical 
activities are obtained, but the body is exerted in 
the most interesting manner for results which are 
useful in themselves beyond the exercise obtained 
in producing them, and in a way which calls the 
mental faculties into joint operation. Therefore, 
after we have enumerated all the general good and 
ethical results of bodily activity, such as the calming 
of the passions, the moral benefits of industry, avoid- 



28 MANUAL TRAINING 

ance of the ills of idleness, protection from many 
forms of temptation and those often the worst, still 
we are far from doing justice to the moral benefits of 
a manual training which has produced a skillful, 
mobilized, useful and strong hand. It is a worthy 
and philosophic question how far and why hand 
culture must be joined with head culture to attain 
the highest moral condition and to erect the greatest 
moral safeguards. A hint of one answer may be 
found in Chap. I, where I have said that hand- 
training and head-training together make the only 
whole education. The ethical advantage of the 
union may be assumed ; for no man can distort him- 
self by exclusive attention to one order of faculties, 
and especially by neglecting to keep good balance 
between the two fundamental co-ordinates of his 
being — body and mind — without finding the distor- 
tion reporting itself in moral obtuseness and dis- 
order. There are some classes of moral excellences 
in which the connection is immediately obvious; for 
example high ethical qualities difficult, perhaps 
impossible, in a condition of servitude. In these, 
everything that decreases a man's independence 
and conscious self-reliance tends to diminish his 
morality. Conversely, whatever increases a man's 
power over circumstances and builds up his self- 



IN EDUCATION 29 

reliance, nourishes many noble qualities that de- 
pend thereon. Some of these are truthfulness, 
courage, generosity, philanthropy, and common 
honesty. The connection between independence 
and self-respect is very close, and again between 
self-respect and many moral qualities of great 
value. Therefore, these orders of morality are 
directly fortified by a training of the hand, which 
makes a man at home and powerful on the earth 
and amid materials, and lifts him above slavish 
helplessness in exigencies. Can any one enlarge 
the soul of his hand (bethinking ourselves of a 
philosophical doctrine that the soul occupies the 
whole body,— which at least has an important 
thought underneath it) and crystallize intelligence 
in that wondrous organ without becoming more of a 
man; and what is that but to say, a better man 
throughout? He may not be a good man then; but 
still worse he would be if his hand were clumsy and 
useless. 



IX. 

That Manual Training in Education is Salutary for 
the Mind. 



Manual training in education is like a sponsor at 
the baptism of intelligence, so much will it under- 
take the good growth of mind. Ejiowledge is an 
obvious point in which manual training serves in- 
tellectual superiority. This needs but statement. 
Plainly it is not only a useful thing, but an accom- 
lishment, an admirable power, to know fine work 
from sham, and hence to feel a thrill of admiration 
when excellence comes before us. And when we 
reflect on the many kinds of manual production, 
how sad to be ignorant of them all — of woodworking 
in all its departments, blacksmithing, metal work- 
ing, the lathe, the plane, soldering, brazing, plumb- 
ing, painting, engraving, stonecutting, casting, and 
a hundred other notable activities of the hand. 
Even the knowledge and judgment of materials 
which hand-work gives is of itself a pleasure and a 
dignity. 

But knowledge is only the tool or the material for 
the mind's work. Turn to the effects of manual 
training on intelligence. It is not easy to set too 
high the mental value of a trained hand (provided a 



32 . MANUAL TRAINING 

sound education join witii manual training) or to do 
justice to the many subtile ways in which skill of 
hand ministers to acumen of mind. There is a cur- 
ious ethnological argument on this point which I 
will quote from a scientific journal: 

It is well known that, in its development, each 
new born being passes through very much the same 
stages that his ancestors have been through before 
him. Even after birth the growth of the child's in- 
telligence simulates the progress of the human race 
from the savage condition to that of civilization. It 
has been shown by Preyer, and others, who have 
studied infant develojDment, that a faculty which 
has been acquired by the race at a late stage is late 
in making its appearance in the child. Now, read- 
ing and writing are arts of comparatively recent 
achievement. Savage man could reap and sow, and 
weave, and build houses long before he could com- 
municate his thoughts to a person at a distance by 
means of written speech. There is, then, reason to 
believe that a child's general intelligence would be 
best trained by making him skillful in many kinds 
of manual labor before beginning to torture him 
with letters; and the moral to be derived is, that 
primary instruction should be instruction in manual 
dexterity, and that reading and writing could be 
learned with pleasure and with ease by a child who 
had been fitted for taking them up by the right kind 
of preparation. The argument is a novel one, and 
it certainly seems plausible. 



IW EDUCATION 33 

This argument is not to be passed by because 
somewhat.it has the aspect of a curious speculation. 
Marvelousness and fact go hand in hand in creation, 
and in no subjects more plainly than in the, rela- 
tions of mind to body. If we consider the vast in- 
fluence on the mind of a quickened observation, and 
how primary is observation in acquiring knov/ledge, 
we shall be at no loss to reason that the development 
of the senses, touch included, and the training of 
the hand in artisanship, must be a root of the 
growth of mind. This, plain in theory, is supported 
by direct testimony. In a report by Professor Ord* 
way to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
on industrial education is the following relating to 
hand-work schools in Sweden : 

Many are united with the public schools, so that 
hand-work and head-work are carried on under the 
same management ; and it is generally found that 
when four or six hours a week are devoted to hand- 
work, the other studies suffer no detriment, but are 
pursued with the greater zeal. 

Another writer, speaking of a carpentry shop con- 
nected with the Dv/ight School in Boston says : 

It is said that boys who work in this shop a few 
hours each week do not fall behind the others in 
scholarship, and all that they learn in the trade is 
clear gain. 



84 . MANUAL TRAINING . ' 

In Leland's paper on "Industrial Art in Schools," 
published by the bureau of education, I find: 

It is gradually or rapidly being realized that 
children can, while at school, profitably practice de- 
corative arts. It is also quite as true that this prac- 
tice, far from interfering with the regular studies, 
actually aids and stimulates them. While the minor 
arts, guided by a knowledge of decorative design, 
are so easy as to be regarded by all children as a 
recreation, they are at the same time of practical 
value in training the eye and hand and awakening 
quickness of perception. There have come under 
my observation a great number of instances in 
which children who have been regarded as dull in 
everything have shown great aptness and ingenuity 
in designing, modeling or carving. When this skill 
is awakened there comes with it far greater clever- 
ness in those studies or pursuits in which the pupil 
was previously slow. I believe it to be a great 
truth, as yet too little studied, that sluggish minds 
may be made active, even by merely mechanical 
exercises. This holds good as regards the practice 
of the minor arts by children. It is somewhat re- 
markable that, while every one is quick to observe 
mental ability or activity when transmitted from 
progenitors, very few notice the innumerable in- 
stances in which it is developed by education or cir- 
cumstances. It is not a matter of theory, but of 
fact and observation, that all children who practice 
decorative arts are thereby improved both mentally 
and morally. The consciousness of being able to 



IJSl EDUCATION 35 

make something well which will sell gives them pro- 
per pride and confidence in their ability to master 
other studies. It also conduces to quiet habits and 
content. 

Opportunity and incentive to join theory and 
practice are important. We are not likely to wish, 
or to strive at the expense of much labor, to under- 
stand the explanation of things which we care 
nothing about doing. This thirst for knowledge be- 
longs only to scientific minds. !^ut who, if oppor- 
tunity be at his door, will not wish and work to 
understand the laws, the relations, the causes, in 
short, the theory or science of arts which he is con- 
tinually practicing? Even to one of pure scientific 
impulse for theory, practice and observation inten- 
sify, brighten, direct and regulate theoretical studies. 

Therefore, in general education, theory should be 
opened to the developing artisan, and manual prac- 
tice to the rising student of science. But in this 
connection it is to be said and enforced especially 
that the manual training school, by reason of its 
twin objects, intellectual and mechanical, is becom- 
ing a necessity because of the minute and degrading 
sub-division of manufacturing labor. Edward At- 
kinson says: "I lately inspected a shop in which 
sewing machines were being made, where one cam 
was shown me which passed through sixty hands 



36 MANUAL TRAINING 

before it was ready for its place in the sewing ma- 
chine." On this point speaks another circular of 
our bureau of education. 

Machinery is making men into machines at such 
a rate that humanity is becoming seriously alarmed 
at the inevitable result. The old apprentice had ^ 
chance to rise, since he learned a whole trade; the 
modern workman, who is kept at making the six- 
tieth part of a shoe, and at nothing else, by a master 
whom he never sees, is becoming a mere serf to 
capital. Even the industrial school, with its ''prac- 
tical" work, can do nothing against this onward and 
terrible march of utilitaria. It is in the teaching 
of art and of the superiority of hand-work in all that 
constitutes taste that the remedy will be found. By- 
and-by, when culture shall have advanced — as it 
will — there will be an adjustment of interests. Ma- 
chinery will supply mere physical comforts. Man, 
end not machinery, will minister to taste and refine- 
ment. 

This minute specialization has become nearly as 
great a difficulty in science as in mechanics, and 
the intellectual result is the same. A writer says : 

Among scientific men themselves the increasing 
specialization of their employments — inevitable, as 
far as we see, for the present — has produced, and is 
likely to produce, most serious disadvantages. It 
is Mill, we think, and before him Comte, the French 
philosopher, who deplores the moral and social ef- 
fect of this dispersion of effort, and the concentra- 



IN EDUCATION 37 

tion of it on only minute fragments of the business 
of life. The interests of the whole, says the former, 
the bearings of things on the ends of the social un- 
ion, are less and less present to the minds of men 
who have so contracted a sphere of activity. The 
insignificant details which form their whole occupa- 
tion, the infinitely minute wheel they help to turn 
in the machinery of society, does not arouse or 
gratify any feeling of public spirit or unity with 
their fellow men. A man's mind is as fatally nar- 
rowed, and his feelings toward the great ends of 
humanity as miserably stunted, by giving all his 
thoughts to the classification of a few insects or the 
resolution of a few equations as to sharpening the 
points and putting on the heads of pins. 

If we suppose a naturalist, not only drifting, af- 
ter his general education, into such minute special* 
ized labor, but trained just for that from the begin- 
ing and for no other, it is plain he would be 
unutterably narrow, mentally worthless, and but a 
shred or shadow of a man. Yet just so is the hand- 
workman made at present. 

There is another effect of manual occupation on 
mental habit, which perhaps is first in importance, 
namely, the constant and unavoidable demands 
which manual training makes on accuracy, and the 
consequent habit of minute, painstaking application, 
patience and exactness which is developed. The 



38 MANUAL TRAINING 

man who will labor for weeks or months to make 
surface plates that fit the one on the other like a 
film of oil to either, or who must work a fitting true 
to the thousandth of an inch, or make an edge 
which is as near the materia] realization of a mathe- 
matical line as mortals can come, will not be likely, 
if his mind be directed to reasonings in economy, 
philosophy, morals or statecraft, to dismiss the 
points with carelessness, or satisfy himself with 
tricks of logic or with off-hand argument. He will 
run his thought as close logically on the subject as 
he runs his tool on material. Nature looks after the 
mechanic's thoroughness and takes him in hand to 
produce a splendid instance of that half mental, half 
moral excellence called precision; for by no other 
way will nature let any result come forth from the 
work. Examine the striking difference in this re- 
spect between an argument before a jury, an oration 
before the Senate, a sermon before a congregation, 
and a piece of finished mechanism. A forensic 
speech or a religious discussion may be a glaring 
outrage on facts of history and of science and on 
the principles of reasoning ; yet they will serve their 
close-at-hand purpose just as well — that is to say, 
they will suit all the requirements of the client, the 
jury, the Senate, the church, which are the masters 



IN EDUCATION 39 

in the worJ£, and seldom ask exactness, either in 
thought or in fact. But what if a mechanic build 
a machine similarly, and for chiefly its effect on 
the ear or eye or fancy? Nature is a different mis- 
tress; she accepts no botchery of that sort. The 
machine refuses to work, which is the vengeance of 
Nature indignant with inaccuracy and bad mental 
habits. Accordingly, a hand-workman is driven to 
precision by the very nature of his occupation. A 
good workman is he who obeys that requirement 
and labors patiently, and at last successfully, for 
the attainment of an ideal precision. And this 
manual necessity has incalculable effect (especially 
if any superjacent education be added) to make good 
habits of thought. After conversing much, as my 
position and occupation have required me to do, with 
men of all classes ana grades, I must own I have 
found no class, not scientific or college-bred men 
themselves, who have been more stimulating, help- 
ful, and valuable in conversation than fine mechan- 
ics, because the exactitude and patience of their 
manual work has created in them a "habit of excel- 
lence" in all operations, whether reflective or exe- 
cutive. 



X. 

That Manual Training in Education is Salutary fot 
the Body. 



Health is an advantage accruing from manual 
training. This point needs no more than statement, 
since it is obvious that bodily exercise is in itself 
conducive to bodily vitality, and especially so when 
united with mental exercise. There is a peculiar 
healthfulness in mental and physical work con- 
joined, as a physician (Elam, in "A Physician's 
Problems") has taken pains to testify, averring that, 
when he wishes to strengthen a feeble child, he pro- 
vides for due mental exercise as carefully as for phy- 
sical. A striking testimony is found in a circular 
of the bureau of education, which gives an account 
of apprenticeship schools in France. In one of these 
the school hours are twelve in number, from 7 in 
the morning to 7 in the evening, with an intermis- 
sion of two hours only for meals. The report says : 

During the first two years six hours daily are 
spent in the workshop and four in the school. In 
the third year eight hours are spent in the workshop 
and two in the school, leaving in each case two hours 
for meals and recreations, the latter including three 
hours of gymnastic exercise per week. When we 
visited the school, unannounced, we found the lads 



43 MANUAL TBAININO 

working steadily and looking strong and healthy. 
M. Greard, in his report of 1878, says that during 
the five preceding years not one of the boys had 
died. 



XI. 

That Manual Training is Beneficial to the Fdch. 



I come to the benefits to the community from 
manual training as a part of education. One advan- 
tage has opened which is to be hailed gladly. It is 
perhaps as important as any, and yet has taken ob- 
servers so by surprise as even to create adverse crit- 
icism. I mean what I may call in general the 
elevation of the ric/t— that is, the lifting up of them 
from their adulation of mere possessions to appre- 
ciation of the greater dignity of skill and workman- 
ship. There is a deep and serious import in 
George Eliot's phrase, "the perishing upper classes." 
Now, it is found happily that not only the poor, but 
the sons of rich men take eagerly to manual train- 
ing schools. This has been criticised, as if these 
schools ought to be the special advantage of the 
needy. But this is to misunderstand their nature, 
and to overlook one of their greatest benefits to the 
community. Just so far as boys from the wealthier 
classes throng them will they be fulfilling one of the 
most important of their natural functions — namely, 
to glorify and dignify fine grades of hand-work. 
When I saw in a Pennsylvania steel foundry a 



44 . MANUAL TRAINING 

young man coarsely clad in overalls, smutty as to 
hands and face with a highly ethical (as I will call 
it) grime, and afterward met that same young fellow 
in a parlor, taking his place easily, with beautiful 
manners, in the circle to which ancestral wealth in- 
troduced him, I thought both ends of the spectacle 
honorable and delightful. There can be no health- 
ier facts for this, or indeed any, country, than such ; 
and whatever manual training school helps or re- 
veals such a tendency, is an encouragement for the 
present and a boon for the future. 



XII. 

That Manual Training is Beneficial to the Poor. 



A benefit to the commuuity is the elevation of the 
poor, a different uplifting, but no less real, though 
less ethical and noble, than that which manual 
training confers on the rich. I mean their eleva- 
tion to the ilnion of theory with practice, and also 
to a greater command of themselves and of their 
conditions. It is one of the great facts of this age 
that more than ever before the poor go to school. 
It is a grand fact that the classes are steadily dimin- 
ishing or disappearing which have no ambition or 
no way to obtain more than a bare subsistence. 
But now that education is not merely for the 
socially elevated, but is charged with elevating 
socially all persons who will, we must fit the educa- 
tion to such condition as many classes now are in, 
that is, join manual training with theoretical studies 
and with literature, and thereby so educate as to 
show the inherent dignity of hand-work, while at the 
same time we improve it; for most of the pupils 
from these classes must get their bread with the 
things that can be seen and handled ; and well is • it 
for the world that it is so. A writer says happily 



46 -MANUAL TJRAimNO 

and wittily: "The old-fashioned system seems to 
have been meant to send its graduates straight to 
heaven, for it utterly ignored the possibility of their 
ever having to use their hands or feet," 



XIII. 

That Manual Training is Imi^ortant for Girls, 



An economic benefit, which also has much to do 
with moral interests, is the immense value thai 
manual training, once thoroughly organized in edu- 
cation, will have for girls. Is it true that we are 
behind other nations in this particular? There are 
those who assert that "we have not yet given the 
American girl as good a chance to learn how to earn 
her living or to take care of a family as is enjoyed 
by her sisters in France or Sweden, or even Mexico.'' 
If this be true, the dangerous omission should re- 
ceive instantly our attention, and reason enough 
there is to deem it of vital importance. Eeform in 
this point will increase not only the mechanical and 
artistic productions of the community, but also its 
elevation in morals. "There is a class of young 
people," says a circular of the bureau of education, 
mostly females, who, having taken the first step in 
vice, linger awhile before taking the second, and 
then are rapidly and utterly degraded" — a solemn 
fact. Beyond its moral import, it affects profound- 
ly the economic and physical interests of society. 
Think of the terrible risks and woes a community 



48 ' MANUAL TRAINING 

undergoes, as well as economic loss, from "the ranks 
of the uneducated, or even so-called educated young 
women when by circumstances these are called to 
earn their own way in the world, and find their 
hands no equipment and no implements for the 
emergency. " 



XIV. 

That Manual Training is Beneficial to Production, 



Manual training in education surely will enhance 
the sum and quality of the manufactured products 
of the community. More and more this is seen. 
I quote an instructive passage from a "Circular of 
Information" of the bureau of education at Wash- 
ington : 

Education makes labor more skillful and more 
productive. This proposition is based on a wide 
comparison of intelligent and ignorant labor, and is 
sustained by such a multitude of observations that 
it is no longer questioned by any one familiar with 
the facts. In 1846, Horace Mann, then secretary 
of the board of education of Massachusetts, opened 
a correspondence with business men to ascertain the 
comparative productive value of educated and un- 
educated labor. The men addressed included manu- 
facturers of all kinds — machinists, engineers, rail- 
road contractors, officers in the army, etc. — men 
who had the means of determining the productive- 
ness of labor by observing hundreds of persons 
working side by side, using the same tools and 
machinery, and working on the same material, and 
making the same fabrics. In many instances the 
productiveness of each operative could be weighed 
by the pound or measured by the yard. The in- 



50 MANUAL TRAINING 

vestigation disclosed an astonishing superiority in 
productive power of the educated laborer as compared 
with the uneducated. "The hand," wrote Mr. 
Mann, "is found to be another hand when guided 
by an intelligent mind. Processes are performed 
not only more rapidly, but better, when faculties 
which have been exercised in early life furnish their 
assistance. In great establishments and among 
large bodies of laborers, where men pass by each 
other ascending or descending in their grades of 
labor just as easily and certainly as particles of 
water of different degrees of temperature glide by 
each other, there it is found to be an almost invar- 
iable rule that the educated laborer rises to a higher 
and higher point in the kinds of labor performed, 
and also in the wages received, while the ignorant 
sinks like dregs and is always found at the bottom." 

In 1870 the National Commissioner of Education 
widened Mr. Mann's investigations, addressing his 
inquiries to business men in all parts of the country 
and to a few large employers in G-reat Britain. The 
result was a complete confirmation of Mr. Mann's 
conclusions. 

The same lesson has been taught and enforced by 
the world's expositions. In 1851 the Queen of 
England sent forth a gracious invitation to the 
nations to send to her proud capital the best pro- 
ducts of human skill. The world responded grandly, 
and the World's Fair at London was the greatest 
and richest collection of the works of art and arti- 
sanship on which the sun had ever shone. The 



IN EDUCATION 51 

exhibition was divided into nearly one hundred 
departments, the jurors were appointed, the articles 
were patiently examined, and at last the verdict was 
given. Great Britain was awarded the palm of 
excell-ence in nearly all the grand departments of 
the exhibition. The announcement of this result lit 
up Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, and otli^r 
manufacturing towns with bonfires, and filled Eng- 
land with general joy. She rejoiced in the belief 
that she was mistress of the industrial world. She 
saw her sails whitening every sea and heard the 
increasing hum of her factories and mills. 

Sixteen years passed over Europe. Napoleon 
III., in imitation of Queen Victoria's example, in- 
vited the nations to send up to his imperial capital 
the choicest products of human industry. The 
world responded even more grandly than before. 
The Paris Exposition was divided, like its predeces- 
sor, into over ninety departments ; the jurors were 
appointed, the articles examined and the verdict 
reached. Great Britain had excelled her competi- 
tors in but ten of all the departments. The an- 
nouncement of the verdict produced consternation 
among the representatives of British industry. They 
met at the Hotel de Louvre, and the one absorbing 
inquiry was, "Why this defeat." The unexpected 
news crossed the channel, causing greater alarm 
than the threatened invasion by Napoleon I. This 
defeat awakened England to the startling fact that 
the mdustrial scepter was slipping from her hands; 
and, as a result, she saw her ships rotting in her 



52 , MANUAL TMAININQ 

harbors and the hammer falling from the hand of 
her starving workmen. The disaster arrested public 
attention, and a searching and thorough investiga- 
tion for its cause was made by a Parliamentary 
commission. The report made to Parliament in 
1868 contains the testimony and the conclusion. 
Education had won the palm of excellence for her 
competitors. The conclusion is forcibly stated in 
the testimony of Mr. Edward Huth. "The work- 
men of other countries," he said, "have a far super- 
ior education to ours, many of whom have none 
whatever. Their productions show clearly that 
there is not a machine working a machine, but that 
brains sit at the loom, and intelligence stands at the 
spinning wheel." 

The discovered cause indicated the remedy, and 
the report to Parliament was soon followed by the 
great education bill, which established a general 
system of elementary education throughout Great 
Britain. Technical schools have been multiplied, 
and science has claimed a larger place in the higher 
schools and universities- Great Britain has appealed 
to the schoolmaster to win back her pre-eminence 
in industry. 

The extraordinary development in the present 
age of the means of communication and transporta- 
tion makes plainer still the need of a wider spread of 
mechanical knowledge and power. The oper- 
ation of steam and of the telegraph, well has it 
been said, means simply that competition has now 



IN EDUCATION 53 

become world-wide, and that the day of local isola- 
tion of trades and industries is passed. Even now 
whatever is made well in California affects similar 
industry in St. Petersburg or Melbourne. So it will 
be more and more. To meet these conditions, any 
community that values industrial eminence, or even 
wealth and power, must spread wider and establish 
more deeply the knowledge of mechanics. 



XV. 

That Manual Training is Beneficial to Inventionc 



Scientific artisan training is important to inven- 
tion. The most valuable inventions must come 
from the educated hand-worker. Why so noticeable 
heretofore that great and important inventions have 
sprung almost never from artisans in the trade, 
whose processes they improved? Plainly because 
the uneducated workman operates like a machine 
performing certain habitual motions or functions 
which, even if exhibiting peculiar skill, are not in 
spired by knowledge of the theory of his work 
This will be changed by scientific and manual train 
ing joined in one education. 

Says a circular of our bureau: "Industries made 
but comparatively slow progress while they were 
carried on by persons whose instruction was limited 
to apprenticeship. Gradually, and in more recent 
times, the idea has made its way that the progress 
of an industry depends especially upon the degree 
of instruction of those who exercise it." A trained 
mechanic, now a large dealer in machinery, said to 
me that one great benefit of the manual training 
school is to be that the skillful mechanic will be- 



56 MANUAL TRAINING 

eome able to tell what he knows, by which capacity, 
now often entirely absent, experience can be com- 
municated and progress quickened. 



XVI. 

That Manual Training is Important in Relation to 
Immigration. 



A problem with which we have to deal is the 
enormous immigration which presents in this 
country one of the most astonishing spectacles in 
history. An eminent scholar said to me recently 
that any community left to itself to increase accord- 
ing to the natural multiplication of the species, will 
be found generally able to solve its own problems 
with happy results ; but when these problems are 
affected by immense hordes of foreign and unedu- 
cated, unskilled and sometimes half -pauperized im- 
migrants, the problem becomes not only distressing 
but difficult and dangerous. Meantime, it seems 
certain that steadiness of character, independence, 
political power and mental worth will go with man- 
ual capacity and ^with genuine respect for hand- 
work. Now, shall this great advantage be surren- 
dered wholly to the foreign element? I heard a 
preacher say that we stood in no danger from our 
immigrants. "If," he said, "a lion eat an ox, the 
lion is in no danger of becoming an ox, but the ox 
becomes lion." True; but we cannot pulverize and 



58 . MANUAL TRAINING 

masticate our immigrants to that degree, or, too, 
with that rapidity. I wish not to keep foreign men 
underlings or leave them undeveloped; but I plead 
for the equal development, side by side with them, 
of American stock, by those qualities and kinds of 
education which confer independence of circum- 
stances and a skillful control over matter. How 
can this be done but by the training of the hand as 
a part of education? And how can this be done but 
by manual training schools ? For the disagreeable- 
ness of practical work in a manufacturing shop by 
reason of the inroads of our untutored foreign resi- 
dents, and the consequent, albeit temporary, vulgari- 
zation of mechanical surroundings, has attracted fore- 
boding attention. A very eminent physician said to 
me lately that he thought it one of the most dis- 
tressing problems of the country, and saw no light 
in it and no way out of it. A document of oui 
bureau of education remarks on this fact: "Immi- 
gration has filled nearly every department of com- 
mon labor with workmen long subject to caste ideas 
and resulting social customs. The unpleasant 
conditions thus resulting have crowded out intelli- 
gent American labor. " Here it is that the institution 
which is both a shop and a school comes to supply 
the pressing need ; for here mind-training and hand- 



IN EDUCATION 59 

training go on together, making elevating and 
beautiful influences. 



XVII, 

That Manual Training affects heneficially the prob- 
lem of Apprenticeship, 



A point of economic value whicli is of incal- 
culable importance, is tlie power of the manual 
training school to cope with the present problem of 
trades' exclusiveness as to apprentices, and indeed 
with the general decay of the apprenticeship system 
from whatever causes. This decline would be 
serious enongh in itself in any community and at 
any time ; but it is rendered more serious here by 
the problems connected with our immigration, by 
the present facilities of communication the world 
over, and by the immense labor necessary to turn 
to account our advantages of soil, climate and 
mineral wealth . This especial need for well ordered 
and skillful mechanical labor, says a circular of the 
bureau of education, "has been attended by a 
steady decline of the apprenticeship system which 
heretofore formed our trained artisans. It has be- 
come more and more evident that if this decline of 
apprentices is not made good by effective training, 
the American manufacturer will be at the mercy of 
the trained laborer of Europe." But, indeed, the 



62 ' MANUAL TRAINING 

old world communities are feeling the same strain. 
Our bureau refers to a French official report as fol- 
lows: 

In consequence of the virtual abolition of appren- 
ticeship in most trades, and owing to the specializa- 
tion and subdivision of manufactures resulting 
from the introduction of machinery, the number of 
skillful and intelligent workmen in all branches of 
industry and art manufacture has decreased, and the 
standard of technical knowledge has been lowered. 
This, the French author considers, has been spe- 
cially prejudicial to French manufactures, the dis- 
tinguishing merit of which he believes to have 
consisted in originality of design. The vulgariza- 
tion of manufactures has, in his opinion, given great 
facilities for piracy, especially on the part of 
foreigners. He believes that a remedy for these 
evils will be found in the establishment of appren- 
ticeship schools, the object of which should be 
mainly not the creation of foremen, but the theo- 
retical and practical education of workmen proper. 
In determining what should be the trades taught in 
schools founded and carried on at the cost of the 
municipality, he would confine them to what he calls 
"parent industries" — ^that is to say, those in which 
the processes to be taught are applicable to a large 
number of allied trades. 

Here the real relief is indicated. No community 
need be at the mercy of mechanics who will not 
teach their art, for it can have a school which will 



IN EDUCATION 63 

fceach it better. Speaking of the founding of a 
school of mechanical arts in the Institute of Tech- 
nology in Boston, Edward Atkinson says : 

At the date of the Centennial Exhibition no such 
school existed; and our late president, Mr. John D. 
Eunkle, there found in the Russian department ex- 
amples of work done, and a statement of the method 
adopted in Russia, which seemed to meet a need that 
we had long felt. With much effort he succeeded 
in obtaining the requisite means, to which the Mas- 
sachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association contri- 
buted a considerable sum in consideration of two 
scholarships, and established the school which I 
have attempted to describe to you. From the time 
he first described it to me, and before I had myself 
examined the Russian work in Philadelphia, I have 
never doubted for a moment that President Runkle 
had brought from the Centennial one of its most val- 
uable lessons, and that he had had the sagacity to 
perceive that in this plan there was a substitute for 
the old method of apprenticeship more effective and 
better than that could ever have been. 

Says another writer: 

The apprentice in a shop is a hewer of wood and 
a drawer of water, the last and least important indi- 
vidual in the shop. In the manual training school 
on the contrary, the boy is the most important in- 
dividual. He is the object for which the school ex- 
ists. He is the material that is to be finished. 
Instead of being left to himself to pick up what 



64 - MANUAL TBAININO 

he can, competent and intelligent instructors de- 
vote themselves to his training. As an appren- 
tice, the boy exists for the benefit of the shop. 
As a scholar in a manual training school, the shop 
exists for the benefit of the boy. 



XVIIIo 

Facts as to the need of Manual Training. 

As to the present condition of manual training in 
education, it is plain that we have it not; and some 
general facts, beside the foregoing statements, press 
home sadly, not to say shamefully, our need of it. 
The following anecdote from a scientific and me- 
chanical journal may illustrate, and perhaps hardly 
over-state, the present condition : 

A young man stepped into the office of the In- 
dianapolis Rolling Mill not long since and asked for 
work. "What can you do?" asked the president. 
"I don't know," said the young man. "Have you 
a trade?" "No Sir." "Where did you come from?" 
"From Pennsylvania." "Are you a German?" "No 
sir; I am an American." "If you were a German, 
or an Irishman, or a Frenchman, I could set you 
to work, because you would know how to do some- 
thing, but Americans don't know anything about 
practical business." 

The crowds of people who seek work willing to do 
anything, jostling in a scramble to pick up any oc- 
cupation, and the small number who have a digni- 
fied skill in general mechanics or in some special 
handicraft — these are the impressive, often distres? 
sing, facts which prove the incapacity of our present 



66 ' MAI^UAL TBAININQ 

education to cope with the needs of the time. An 
editor advertised for a clerk and instantly had 
500 applications; a mechanic advertised for a skilled 
artisan, and had only five or six answers, and most 
of those too old. This state of things influences 
our public service disastrously, producing not only 
a mean and demorahzing scramble for office, but 
inefficiency and unfaithfulness in duty. Said a Col- 
lector of the Port of New York : " You can possibly 
appreciate my situation when you hear that I have 
■ received applications for the position of weigher 
from 840 persons; and yet there are only fifteen 
weighers to be appointed." Sometimes— so great 
is popular thoughtlessness on this point— this evil 
is ascribed to education itself. It is said we have 
over-educated the youth of the country so that the 
boy has become too fine for his father's trade, and 
manual work is despised. This is not over-education, 
but bad education. The foolish, unrepublican and 
inhumane shows of wealth, the selfishness of the 
cultivated classes, the influence of slavery in our 
history, which perhaps will not be out-grown for 
half a century yet; immigration, the disturbing in- 
fluences of the rapid transportation by railroads, 
which have not yet slipped into their normal and 
necessary relations to the community; the magical 



IN EDUCATION 67 

growth of great cities, especially in the west; 
idleness, laziness, intemperance, the evil effects of 
agitators either vicious or ignorant that affect idle 
crowds, and the general atmosphere of alteration, 
revolution and reconstruction filling the whole earth 
at present with an uncertain groping, or often wild 
clutching, after a new condition, which prove pecu- 
liarly misleading to the indolent, — all these facts 
sufficiently account for our uncomfortable situation 
in respect to skilled artisanship, without resorting 
to the foolish plea that we have over-educated our 
young blood. The converse is true, if we take a 
high view of education. We have under-educated 
them by failing to add that manual training which 
would confer on the community the economic ad- 
vantage of high respect for hand-work, and on the 
pupil the dignity of skill and of independence. Con- 
sequently, we have made misshapen and distorted 
men — too much grown in one part, too little in an- 
other, mental hunchbaeks and clubfeet; and no 
more than an army of deformed bodies could carry 
a nation through a war, can communities of minds 
misshapen by one-sided pressure, bring a country 
to the level of the industrial requirements of peace. 



XIX. 

Beginnings, — Present Schools, 



Regarding attempts at manual training in educa- 
tion, but slight information can be given, because 
the subject is so new, the efforts so few, and the 
accessible reports of them necessarily meager. Two 
kinds of mechanical schools must be distinguished. 
One is a school devoted to preparation for a special 
trade; but this I pass by without notice, for though 
many such exist, they do not come properly within 
the scope of manual training as an instruction of 
the hand in due course of general education. The 
other kind is a school of manual operations of many 
different sorts, preferring no one trade to another, 
but seeking to develop skill of hand and knowledge 
of materials, and to add to this a scientific and 
literary education. These are the true manual train- 
ing schools. Even in the old civilization of Europe 
comparatively little has been attempted and little 
progress made as yet in the creation of such schools. 
France has some such in Paris, Eheims,Lyons, Rouen 
and several other cities ; and there are two kinds — 
a primary or elementary sort, giving quite general 
instruction, and a peculiar system of "apprentice- 



70 ' MANUAL TRAINING 

ship schools," which, while supplying technical, 
scientific and literary instruction, aim "to form 
workmen as distinguished from foremen." Some 
such schools shape their manual training wholly 
for particular trades ; others give a general training 
before the trade is chosen, and after that a special 
training for the trade. These apprenticeship schools 
are few in number, but there are many of the ele- 
mentary kind. A circular of our bureau of educa- 
tion, quoting from an English report of 1882, says : 
"There were when we visited Paris twenty-three 
primary schools to which a workshop had been at- 
tached. Ten others were on the point of being 
opened, and preparations were being made for at- 
taching workshops to twelve others." In another 
circular of 1884, our bureau says: "The French 
are now preparing for a great extent of hand-work 
in the schools of Paris, both for boys and girls, but 
it will take time to realize their ideas." From the 
same document we may learn of hand-work schools 
in Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Fin- 
land. Sweden has shown much vitality on this 
subject. The report says it has been found difficult 
to "keep up with the demand for teachers in the 
new system, and to provide for the rapidly spread- 
ing introduction of the hand-work element in the 



IN EDUCATION 71 

common schools. Teachers' institutes are held for 
six weeks in the summer to give the ordinary teach- 
ers a chance to learn the wood-work art, that they 
may give instruction in hand- work in addition to 
their other teaching." In England < 'hand- work in 
schools and hand-work schools seem to have made 
little progress," but "there has been much agita- 
tion on the subject and some movement has begun." 
The latest facts which I have been able to glean 
ar6 in an excellent circular of information of our 
bureau of education, under date of Sept. 5th, 1885, 
being **a review of the reports of the British Eoyal 
Commissioners on Technical Instruction." The 
circular says: "It will be found that in every one 
of the old polytechnics [that is, scientific polytech- 
nic schools] the notion prevails that if the brain be 
thoroughly trained, the hands will take care of 
themselves. This is the old view of higher tech- 
nology." As a consequence there is an excess of 
polytechnic graduates over the demand. One mana- 
ger of large engineering works put in his window 
the notice, "No polytechnic student need apply." 
The Austrian minister of instruction, says the cir- 
cular, "told the writer that the most serious pro- 
blem in education in that country is to reduce the 
number of theoretical engineers who, after their 



72 ' MANUAL TRAINING 

long course of study, found themselves not wanted, 
and to increase the number of men in whose train- 
ing theory and practice had been so combined that 
they could meet the great demand for those who can 
put theory and practice together. " This on the man- 
ual side of the value of joint education. On the 
other, or intellectual side, is the following from the 
English report : *'Your commissioners cannot re- 
peat too often that they have been impressed with 
the general intelligence and technical knowledge of 
the masters and managers of industrial establish- 
ments on the continent. They have found that these 
persons as a rule possess a sound knowledge of the 
sciences upon which their industry depends. They 
are familiar with every new scientific discovery of 
importance and appreciate its applicability to their 
special industry. They adopt not only the inven- 
tions and improvements made in their own country, 
but also those of the world at large, thanks to their 
knowledge of foreign languages and of the condi- 
tions of manufacture prevalent elsewhere." 

Eussia has the honor of leading the world in 
manual training as a part of education. The circu- 
lar says : 

"The new idea which appears here and there 
among the technical schools is to incorporate shop- 



IN EDUCATION 73 

work with the essential parts of the old courses. 
This has been done in three ways: (1) by mixing 
shopwork with the duties of each week, as at Mos- 
cow; (2) by consolidating the shopwork in a year 
following the school course, as at St. Petersburg; 
(3) by requiring a certain amount of shopwork as a 
condition of admission to the schoolwork, as at the 
Eoyal Foreman School of Chemnitz. The Eussians 
alone among European nations are entitled to the 
credit of attempting to reform the technical training 
of engineers and mechanics by mixing workshop 
instruction with other elements of the polytechnic 
course. Their success is remarkable. * * * * 
Eussia is the lee shore upon which the choicest 
educational pebbles may be gathered. In studying 
Eussia one sees all European technological educa- 
tion epitomized, and the whole plan of the new edu- 
cation in Eussia may be seen in the two schools of 
technology at St. Petersburg and Moscow. In each 
school is an ample, well equipped manufacturing 
machine shop where the students see good work done 
by skilled mechanics and are taught to do such them- 
selves ; the course of study is otherwise substantial- 
ly the same as in the Grerman polytechnics. In 
each shop a definite number of hours of work are 
required of every student, with this difference in the 
plan, that at Moscow the shopwork is mixed with 
the duties of every week of the six-year course; at 
St. Petersburg it is consolidated into a fifth year, 
after all the school work of the four-year course 
has been finished. At Moscow no week passes with- 



74 . MANUAL TliAININO 

out shopwork ; at St. Petersburg no shop work is 
done till the beginning of the fifth year, which year 
is wholly devoted to drawing and shopwork. The 
two schools differ also in this, that at St. Petersburg 
all the students are externs, at Moscow about one- 
third are boarders. * * -^ * To give zest to 
the rather tedious work of the first three years the 
boys hear lectures on practical topics, such as the 
best cutting angle of files, the set of saw teeth, 
etc., which may not make them any better mechan- 
ics, yet tends to improve their general intelli- 
gence." The Boyal Foremen's school at Chemnitz 
requires shopwork as a "preliminary condition of 
admission." It is designed to give mechinists, dy- 
ers, tanners, millers, and other machanics, a theor- 
etical and scientific knowledge of their arts, and 
"the student must have worked at least two years 
at his calling before entering." 

France continues her attention to the subject, 
and has many schools of two different classes, 
namely, the apprenticeship school in which particu- 
lar trades are taught, and common schools, in which 
manual training in general is carried on with liter- 
ary and scientific education. These are often under 
very rigorous discipline, the students sometimes 
wearing uniform, and being very closely held to 
work. The school day is sometimes twelve and 
three quarters hours long, divided about equally be- 
tween the school room and the shop. Some of these 



IJSr EDUCATION '^^ 

schools take children even as young as six years old, 
and give them three hours of instruction each week 
in handicraft. After ten years of age they work 
eighteen hours a week in the shop. The Eoyal com- 
missioners say that "in affording an education m 
which theory is not carried too far and is duly 
combined with laboratory practice, and in some 
cases with workshop instruction, and in which, 
moreover, the scientific teaching is made to bear 
upon the principal manufacturers of the districts, 
these higher technical schools (a grade below the 
German polytechnics and the Ecole Centrale of Paris) 
provide the kind of education that is best adapted to 
the various grades of managers of works." 

As to English progress in this subject, the royal 
report, after expressing the view on the intellectual 
side, "that many workmen are disposed to attach too 
little value to the importance of acquiring a know- 
ledge of the principles of science because they do 
not see their application," says on the practical or 
manual side, "Your commissioners have had the 
opportunity of inspecting the manual work of the 
pupils, both at the Manchester board schools and at 
the central school in Sheffield, and they are satis- 
fied that such work is very beneficial as a part of 
the preliminary education of boys in this country 



76 , MANUAL TRAINING 

who are to be subsequently engaged in industrial 
pursuits, even though it should not, as however it 
probably will do, actually shorten the period of 
their apprenticeship. " 

As to Ireland, the commissioners say: "We need 
scarcely point out that, if it be deemed desirable to 
introduce manual instruction in the use of tools in 
elementary schools at all, this would apply in an 
eminent degree to the primary schools of Ireland. 
It was stated in evidence before us, that in some 
parts of Ireland ordinary handicrafts, like those of 
the mason, have become absolutely extinct. 
Whether the children remain in their own immed- 
iate localities or migrate to other parts of the 
country, or emigrate to our colonies or to foreign 
countries, such instruction leading up to their 
apprenticeship as skilled laborers, instead of their 
fulfilling, as is now too much the case, the part of 
mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, would 
be of the greatest value to them. We are happy to 
find that the authorities of the national board of 
education in Ireland appreciate the importance of 
introducing instruction in manual work into their 
schools." 

How meager are these facts for a review of the 
condition of such a subject in the world; yet they 



IN EDUCATION 77 

include all of mucli importance which our bureau of 
education has collected from foreign reports. As 
regards our own country, information at present is 
equally meager. In the report of our commissioner 
of education for 1882-83, filling over 1,000 pages, 
but three or four are devoted to "progress of instruc- 
tion in practical mechanics," and these pages men- 
tion only a course of shop practice in the Colorado 
Agricultural college, the Dlinois Industrial univer- 
sity, Purdue university in Indiana, the College of 
Mechanical Arts at Cornell university, the Agricul- 
tural and Mechanical college of Texas, the Institute 
of Technology at Boston, and the Manual Training 
school of St. Louis. A circular of the bureau adds 
a brief history of experiments in Peru, 111., Moline, 
111., New Haven, Conn., the school in Chicago, two 
experiments in Boston, a genuine apprenticeship 
school in New York city and a school in Baltimore. 
The latter has a special significance, for the circular 
remarks: "Baltimore is the first municipality to 
establish a manual training school as an integral 
part of the public school system." 

The report of our commissioner for 1883-84, just 
at hand (March, 1886), of over 1,200 pages, has but 
three pages devoted to manual training. These 
mention a school in Brookline, Mass., and add: 



78 ' MANUAL TRAINING 

"So far as reported to this office, the cities in which 
provision for manual training has been made in 
connection with the public schools, or under the 
auspices of the public school boards are Boston, 
New Haven, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, 
Toledo, Chicago, Moline and Peru." I know not 
why some of these cities should be credited thus. 
The subject has been broached in the school board 
of Chicago, but without action as yet. There is a 
school at Cleveland, but not a public school; it has 
the peculiarity of holding its sessions in the after- 
noons from 2 : 30 to 5 : 30 o'clock, and on Saturday 
mornings from 9 to 12 o'clock, so "that it may sup- 
plement," says its circular, "the present method of 
education," and "so arrange the exercises that the 
pupils of many of the existing schools may avail 
themselves of the instruction given in its classes." 
To the cities which have taken a forward step in 
providing for manual training in the public schools 
must be added Omaha. 

A course in mechanic arts has just been opened in 
the State Agricultural school of Michigan, at Lan- 
sing. There is a school of mechanics, long estab- 
lished, at Worcester, Mass. Besides these I have 
met a reference, how authoritative I cannot say, to 
manual instruction at Girard college, in Philadel- 



IN EDUCATION 79 

phia. A meager enumeration, not complete, no 
doubt, but, even if much multiplied, still a meager 
collection of facts on such a subject as the training 
of the hand viewed as a department of education. 
I have been able to visit no school but the one in 
Chicago. In that, there are six hours of school 
work daily except Saturday and Sunday. Of the six 
hours, two are give to shop -work, one to drawing, 
three to literary, mathematical and scientific studies, 
for three years. The mechanical instruction for 
the first year is in wood-working, the next year in- 
cludes two months in foundry-work, and eight 
months in blacksmithing; in the third year, which 
completes the course, the mechanical work is in the 
machine shop. 

[Note. — I learn from Prof. C. M. Woodward, Director of the 
Manual Training School at St. Louis, Mo., that in September, 1885, 
the Technical School at Manchester, England, was changed to a 
school of Manual Training, exactly on the plan of the St. Louis 
School, under guidance of two addresses delivered there by him 
in the previous spring : also that the St. Louis plan has been fol- 
lowed directly in the school at Baltimore Cpublic), and in that at 
Chicago (private), and partially in public schools at Boston, New 
York, Philadelphia, Toledo, Eau Claire. Omaha, and in private 
schools at Cleveland and Denver ] 



XX. 

Manual Training in Public Schools, 



Although some cities have entered actually on the 
experiment, still among educators it is an important 
question whether manual training should be intro 
duced into our public schools. A discussion of this 
point will ]be found in a circular of our bureau of 
education, of 1881, entitled " The Eelation of Educa- 
tion to Industrial and Technical Training in Ameri- 
can Schools." The conclusions are adverse to 
industrial departments in the public school system. 
Another discussion, with similar conclusions, is to 
be found in a circular of the bureau, dated January, 
1885. On the other hand, an English commission, 
after reviewing and citing French laws on the sub- 
ject, thus sums up 

It is clearly the aim of the government and of the 
great cities that this superior instruction shall be 
placed as fully as possible within the reach of the 
workingmen. The instruction in the use of tools 
during the elementary school age, besides being of 
service to every child, whether destined to become a 
mechanic or not, will tend, in the former case, to 
facilitate the learning of a trade, though it may not 
actually shorten the necessary period of apprentice- 



82 MANUAL TRAINING 

ship. We should be glad to see this kind of manual 
instruction introduced into some of our own elemen- 
tary schools. The consideration of the expediency 
of a grant from the education department for instruc- 
tion of this kind may be well deferred for the 
present. 

The subject was discussed at the meeting of the 
National Educational Association, at Madison, 
Wis., in July, 1884. The need of special schools of 
mechanic arts "was freely admitted;" but as to 
whether manual training should become a part of 
th^ public school system, views differed widely, but, 
says the report of the commissioner, with "a general 
agreement " against it. Prof. Woodward, director 
of the manual training school at St. Louis, said, 
"My advice is, go slowly. Do not mistake the 
shadow for the substance. Treat manual training 
with dignity and respect." 

The following is a decided opinion from a special 
point of view ; I take it from an article on the labor 
question : 

Industrial education in manual training schools 
must be introduced into our system of public schools. 
At present our young people have no chance to learn 
a trade in a factory. They are employed at part 
work, so that it takes a team of seven men to make 
a boot and several hundred men to make a watch. 
The principles of mechanical employments are few, 



IN EDUCATION 83 

and could be taught,together with other intellectual 
teaching, in the common schools. With a knowledge 
of these principles individuals could shift from one 
trade to another without being compelled to remain 
idle on account of their inability to work outside o 
their single trade. 

Such divergent opinion, as well as the great im- 
portance of the subject and the paramount interest 
of all that touches education, show that the relation 
of the state to this subject — the question of manual 
training in our public schools — needs wide and care- 
ful discussion, particularly by experienced, thought- 
ful and learned educators. I will not offer a confident 
opinion ; yet it is my conclusion that manual train- 
ing ought to be incorporated radically with public 
education, and go hand in hand with mental train- 
ing froin the primary grades up to our high schools, 
or even to our university doors. 



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